History and time: the problem of the new beginning in Walter Benjamin's philosophy

In his early and especially late works, Walter Benjamin develops his own concepts of history and subject. The latter partly relates to psychoanalytical concepts of subject but differs from those in experimentally and scientifically oriented psychological approaches. Denouncing historicism, which constitutes the basis of the cultural-historical approach in psychology (among others), Benjamin questions both the cyclic and the linear, or progressive, concept of time from the standpoint of the moment of «here and now». In his own words, he conceptualizes time as history that takes place in «now-time of recognizability» (Jetztzeit der Erkennbarkeit). Only that kind of time, according to Benjamin, lets the history take place and begin, differing it from the empty, homogenous flow of mythical time. Benjamin does not solely develop his critique of the myth’s subject. He also critically defines the now-time as history, describing the phenomenological reality of the crisis of subjectivity and the subject of history as such. The paper focuses on the latter and analyzes it with the help of Benjamin’s figures of the storyteller, the critic and the historian, used to describe his own critical work. The paper sheds light on the linguistic nature of the crisis of subjectivity and, in this context, on Benjamin’s ideas of history, freedom and transformation of the subject, as well as on the possibility of something essentially new. In the course of analysis, the author of the article points out some psychological and psychotherapeutic consequences of W. Benjamin’s ideas which can induce psychology to take a critical look at its own understanding of history, subject and development, both from the theoretical and the empirical perspective.